Stories

Whether you need to get the foundations of a good polished design that you can customize for a client, or you just want to make a side-project beautiful, RailsThemes.com is going to get you where you want to go… fast.

Wes Baily released a little gem called CLAWS last week that allows you to interface with your AWS account through the command line and check the status of your EC2 instances and even to SSH into them directly from there. He's planning on adding support for multiple accounts, and Amazon's RDS and ELB services in the future.

ito Botta sent us a note about a Bash script he wrote that automatically kills stuck Resque workers and retries failed job. He noticed that out of the 160 million jobs he had been running, 43,000 had failed and most of them had been retried successfully except for a few thousand who were simply stuck because of excessive load, networking issues or simply race conditions. Using shell commands, this script kills the stuck Resque workers and retries the corresponding failed jobs. Apparently, this helped him keep things stable enough to not have to intervene manually in production.

Avdi Grimm presented at Hashrocket's Lunch & Learn recently and they were kind enough to release the video and slides of the talk. The talk covers Avdi's experience with hunting for logic that clutters up our active record models and how to refactor them to introduce a little bit more object-orientedness in our Rails apps.

He covers different techniques for refactoring: extending using module, creating delegator objects, using composition, etc. He also goes into the pros and cons of each of these techniques, and which ones are appropriate for specific use cases.

Many Rails developers have been using Heroku's new Cedar stack for a while now, and Heroku has just made it Generally Available which means it will soon be the default stack when creating an app. As a reminder Cedar comes with a series of improvements of the HTTP stack allowing you to use chunked responses, long polling, and also an asynchronous webserver to handle multiple responses from a single web process. It also introduced the heroku run command to execute single commands and output them to your local terminal or attach your remote app's rails console to your terminal on a one-off dynos. You can find out in the Heroku dev center docs which have been updated for Cedar as well.

Dokuen is a personal app platform inspired by the Twelve-Factor App manifesto written by Heroku's founder Adam Wiggins. It allows you to deploy applications on your own machine or a local machine very much like you would on a service like Heroku, by just pushing to a git repo. It borrows heavily from the Cedar stack, uses Gitolite to host Git repositories, Nginx as a web server, Mason to use buildpacks, and a bunch of other familiar open source projects.

If you feel like adding a creepy sense of self-awareness to your Ruby code or your command line apps, you might want to try the Talks gem which uses the eSpeech speech synthesizer. It can notify you that a long task like tests has finished executing by simply saying it to you.

We look at easier schema-less hstore on Postgres, Ruby versions in your Gemfile, and Skype in your app. We learn how to DRY better, build a Gem from scratch, build a book without scratching yourself and how to binge on Code School for free.